The present invention relates to automatically processing a user""s communication. In particular, the present invention relates to method and apparatus for automatically recognizing and/or processing possibly erroneous or incomplete user""s communication.
In recent years, automated attendants have become very popular. Many individuals or organizations use automated attendants to automatically provide information to callers or to route incoming calls. Typically, a user places a call and reaches an automated attendant (e.g. an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) system) that prompts the user for desired information and searches an informational database for the requested information. The user enters the request, for example, a name of a business or individual via a keyboard, keypad or spoken inputs. The automated attendant searches for a match based on the user""s input and outputs a result if a match can be found.
However, in these conventional systems, if the automated attendant is unable to find a suitable match in its database or if the user is unsatisfied with the results, the user is connected to an operator for further assistance. This process can be time consuming and a user may become frustrated if he or she does not have the exact name of the business for which the additional information, such as a telephone number, is desired. In other words, if the user has a partial or erroneous name of the business, then the user may not be able to quickly find the desired information or may not find the requested information at all. This scenario results in either wasted time or a lost business opportunity for the both the user and the intended business.
The invention concerns a method and apparatus for processing a user""s communication. The invention may include receiving a list of recognized symbol strings of one or more recognized entries. The list of recognized symbol strings may include a first similarity score associated with each recognized entry. From each recognized symbol string one or more contiguous sequences of N-symbols may be extracted. At least one extracted contiguous sequence of N-symbols may be matched with at least one stored contiguous sequence of N-symbols from a first database. Based on those matched N-symbols and first similarity scores, a preliminary set of symbol strings and associated second similarity scores may be generated. The preliminary set of symbol strings may include one or more stored symbol strings from a second database that contain one or more matched contiguous sequences of N-symbols. A third similarity score associated with the one or more stored symbol strings included in the preliminary set of symbol strings may be computed. A refined set of symbol strings from the preliminary set of symbol strings based on the computed third similarity score may be output.